I Drink Your Blood

This movie was very disappointing. It started out as intriguing and unsettling, but later just turns into this tedious and crazy mess. Satanic, burnt-out hippies spreading murderous havoc had a lot of potential for a good horror film. It felt like a mix between Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Cronenberg's Rabid (1977). But unfortunately, the script is a mess, the acting is pretty bad, and it just makes the flick boring. The only things that redeem it a little is the buckets of enjoyable, cheap gore, and surprisingly, the music is actually pretty good.

Formerly known as Phobia, I Drink Your Blood is a fine example of raw, unflinching, horror. Horror, with a chip on it's shoulder. Horror with a small budget, a smaller cast, often humorous dialog, but let me tell you, that on this day, there is evil in the air, and it's awfully humid.

A gang of Satan-worshiping hippies, with bad intentions, ends up in a nearly-abandoned town, after their van breaks down. With only a population of 40, the gang figures that this is their town now, so they pick a house, settle in, but soon grow bored with all the acid taking, and rat killing, and take out their frustrations by forcing some acid on a defenseless, old man. I would imagine, forcing LSD on the elderly would be a real keen time for most hippie-satanists. Unfortunately for the gang, the old man's grandson, little Pete, takes offense to this prank, and seeks vengeance for grandpa's psychedelic misery in a way that any level-headed boy would. The portly, little fellow finds a rabid dog, shoots the damn thing, fills up a syringe with the blood, and injects it into some food in the bakery, which would end up in the stomach's of the acid-fueled satanist's. Evil has just got a double-dose of madness, and it's feeling real bad, and that can only mean bad news for the unsuspecting "town" .

Contrary to what I had heard, I Drink Your Blood is not exactly a Lucio Fulci blood bath, or even what I would consider a gore film, in fact, I see no reason why they couldn't have squeezed in an R rating. With that said, gore, or even moderate amounts of blood, ain't everything. I Drink Your Blood, from beginning to end, is a nightmarish hell, with no redeeming qualities. With this one, you can feel the evil, as if it's in the room, with you, plus, the psychotic score, and nerve-racking sound-effects couldn't be more fitting. I recommend I Drink Your Blood to anyone who appreciates quality, low-budget horror from the dark side, but regardless of what Bhaskar tells you, I sincerely doubt Satan was ever an acid head. 8/10

Pete Banner (Riley Mills), his pretty older sister Sylvia (Iris Brooks), and their gramps, Doc. Banner (Richard Bowler), sure don't have much in the way of smarts.

When Sylvia catches hippie Andy (Tyde Kierney) stealing a chicken for use in a black magic ritual, she doesn't call the police: instead, she lets him take the bird, just so long as she can spy on Andy and his pals performing their ceremony. Spotted lurking in the woods by the naked Satanists, the girl is pursued, beaten and abused. In retrospect, calling 911 would have been the wiser option.

Gramps also displays a remarkable lack of common sense. When Sylvia is found in a catatonic state, he quite rightly thinks that the gang of hippies staying at the local deserted hotel are responsible. However, rather than contact the sheriff (does this family not own a phone?), the old man grabs his shotgun and goes it alone to have it out with the drug-crazed drop-outs. One doddery pensioner against eight devil-worshipping lunatics on L.S.D. -- unsurprisingly, it doesn't go well for Doc. Banner.

As for young Pete, he has to be the stupidest of the lot: in order to take revenge, the lad extracts blood from a rabid dog and injects it into a tray of meat pies that he sells to the hippies. Soon, instead of lawless Satanists, the town is under siege from crazed maniacs foaming at the mouth (I wonder how many tubes of toothpaste went into the making of this film) with a lust for blood who can pass on the deadly disease via a bite. Pretty soon, there are machete wielding maniacs everywhere!

Produced by exploitation movie legend Jerry Gross, and written and directed by David Durston, I Drink Your Blood is exactly what a drive-in/grindhouse movie should be: cheap, totally trashy, with over-the-top performances, gratuitous nudity and plenty of gore. It takes until the halfway point to really get into full swing, but when it does, the film is an absolute blast.

The mayhem starts proper as Manson-like cult leader Horace (played with wild-eyed relish by Bhaskar Roy Chowdhury) and his followers start to feel the effects of the rabies, black Satanist Rollo (George Patterson) being the first to go full-on bonkers, stabbing fellow hippie Shelley in the gut with a dagger and then hacking off his foot with an axe. The rest soon follow suit, with cultist Molly (Rhonda Fultz) infecting a whole crew of construction workers (with rabies, although they might well have contracted something else as well), making matters even worse. Meanwhile, Sylvia and uninfected Andy (now a couple, the girl having bounced back from her earlier ordeal) and Pete try to avoid being sliced and diced until construction site foreman Roger Davis (John Damo) can alert the authorities.

I Drink Your Blood was one of the first films to be rated X by the MPA based on its violence, and its easy to see why: there are plenty of shocking scenes of brutality, with an evisceration, an uncredited Lynn Lowry (who appeared in George Romero's similarly themed The Crazies) cutting off a woman's hand with an electric carving knife, a pregnant woman impaling herself with a stake, self-immolation, a pitchfork in the throat, a sword in the back and out of the mouth, and my favourite moment, the shock decapitation of a major character, the victim's head carried around by the killer. As I watched the violence escalate, my rating kept getting higher and higher!

A neat downbeat ending tops off what is a hugely entertaining exploitation classic that demands to be seen by any self-respecting gore-hound or trash movie aficionado.

I recently saw this forgotten gem, and I had a great time! Satan-worshiping hippies, a dead goat, lots of rats and plenty of nudity;what's not to like? Well, there were a few things I didn't like, sad to say. First on the list is the "Score". Whoever did this should be locked in a tiny room and forced to listen to it for seventeen hours in THX. Basically, it's a car alarm and drums looped over and over at increasingly harsh frequencies, making the audience long for the sweet low tones of a dentist's drill. Second on the list is the distracted acting. It's as if everyone in the town was eating prozac like skittles between takes. Aside from those two peeves, I had a blast watching it, and so might you, just remember to use the mute button. You'll need it.

A Satanic cult, apparently loosely based on the Manson family, moves into a new hunting ground. After terrorizing a local store and the family that operates it, one little boy finds a way to get revenge: infect the killers with rabies. While in the real world this would result in death, in the world of cinema it leads to a massive murder frenzy.

This film came to me highly recommended from the same man who passed along "Spider Baby" and "Dr. Humpp", both impressive and memorable films. It also happens to be the first film rated X for violence, which gives it a strong street credibility, in my opinion. As you may imagine, my expectations were a bit higher than average.

The film starts out a bit slow. Killers, with a strong attachment to Satanism and LSD, drifting from town to town. It's not a particularly interesting plot, and none of the characters -- even the leader (played by Bhaskar Roy Chowdhury) -- stand out as anyone worth caring about. The family is a bit more interesting, but for the most part the first half served no real purpose besides building up the potential for a bloody Hatfield and McCoy-style feud. But then the second half came.

Once the gang is infected with rabies (served in tainted meat pies), all heck breaks loose. Foaming at the mouth, thirsty for blood and wielding axes... these maniacs aren't going to rest until everyone in the county is dead. Limbs are hacked off and carried around like trophies. Today this level of violence wouldn't get you an X -- more likely an R or at most an NC-17 if the censors were feeling frisky -- but for the time period you're unlikely to find anything on this level. The blood is on par with Lewis' "Blood Feast", if not surpassing it.

I don't feel that "I Drink Your Blood" is a must see. I wouldn't rank it as high as "Spider Baby" or "Dr. Humpp", for example. However, I also wouldn't call this a don't-see film. It had all the exploitation and gore that any classic horror fan would be looking for, and it would scare the pants off your grandmother if she wasn't already dead. If your grandmother even wears pants, that is. Let's put it like this: if you get a chance to catch this movie, catch it, but don't go out of your way to put it at the front of your Netflix queue.